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me the horrid tenant of thy heart

Gothic and
Melodrama

The development
of Gothic drama and that of melodrama are closely interrelated. Both forms
aim at affecting spectators through the use of theatrical effects and a
dramaturgy based on excess and display. And both were extremely popular
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although melodramatic
forms will continue to be popular throughout the Victorian age, whereas
Gothic drama will gradually disperse into other theatrical and dramatic
manifestations. The passages available here represent two important instances
of the intersection between melodrama and the Gothic.Thomas
Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery was first
performed at Covent Garden on 13 November 1802 and is the first English
dramatic work to be explicitly called a “melodrama”. A translation and
adaptation of Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Coelina, ou l’enfant
du mystère, Holcroft’s play presents the themes and devices
that will become recurrent features in nineteenth-century melodramatic
texts. Instead, Maturin’s Bertram
(Drury Lane, 9 May 1816), one of the outstanding Gothic dramas of the Romantic
period, illustrates how the languages of the melodrama – its verbal excess,
physical display of emotions, set characters, etc. – are also crucial constitutive
features of legitimate drama.

The
Bibliography
section lists references to a series of useful
studies on the melodrama and its links with Romantic or Gothic theatre.
The section on Insights
offers some excerpts from these studies: Michael Booth on the relationship
between English Gothic drama and melodrama and French melodrama; Allardyce
Nicoll on the origins of the melodramatic form and its typologies; and
Joseph Donohue on melodrama as a theatre of excess, display and a peculiar
balance between order and disorder.

INSIGHTS

"What
gave melodrama impetus were Gothic novels of terror and the supernatural,
and Gothic tragedies, some of them adaptations of the novels performed
both before and after 1790. Melodrama’s rigid moral pattern, character
types, and much of its machinery were derived from eighteenth-century sentimental,
tragedy and comedy with their excess of moral sentiment, exaltation of
virtue, exhaustive exploitation of pathos and distress, generous but erring
heroes, suffering heroines, comic servants, surprising revelations, mistaken
identities, long-lost orphans, and missing documents. The English sentimental
drama and novel in turn influenced the French comédie larmoyante
and drame bourgeois; indeed, there was considerable interaction between
these forms and current English drama on the one hand and English Gothic,
German Gothic, and French boulevard melodrama of the post-Revolutionary
period on the other. […] Parisian melodrama was in turn derived from English
Gothic, and it would be wrong to say that English melodrama was a French
product. By 1800 the pattern of melodrama was set, and the rest of the
century made additions and variations only. French plays continued to supply
plots for melodramatists, and the novel proved fruitful for the adapter.
The tendency of much nineteenth-century fiction is to the same extremes
of vice, virtue, sensationalism, and pathos that one finds in melodrama.
Scott’s romantic Gothicism and Dickens’s domestic sentiment were enormously
popular on the stage, and from The Castle of Otranto to East Lynne and
Trilby the melodrama of the novel provided melodrama for the theatre."

"Roughly,
the melodramas of the period may be classed in three main divisions: the
romantic, the supernatural and the domestic; and we may consider this dramatic
form as a whole to have developed chronologically from one division to
another in the order which is given above. Pixérécourt, who
[…] gave the final impetus to the melodramatic movement, was primarily
romantic in aim, and that romantic atmosphere was consolidated in the English
theatres through the influence of Sir Walter Scott. Romanticism, however,
always loves the strange and the uncanny, and we do not feel surprise when
we discover ghosts and goblins freely mingling with more material personages
on the romantic stage. These ghosts and goblins, however, soon come to
assume a predominant position, and thus is evolved the Freischütz
drama, in which the interest definitely centres in the supernatural effects.
Perhaps the domestic melodrama may be regarded as a kind of reaction to
both these types, although in essence it is but the enunciation by illegitimacy
of that realistic tendency which ever accompanies romanticism. On the one
side, the fanciful kingdoms, the gloomy castles, the ruined abbeys; on
the other, the dingy cottage, the slum tenement, the poverty-stricken alleys.

"The
basic rhythm of melodrama serves to make plain what is ordinarily hidden
or ambiguous; typically, this rhythm is felt through the climactic display
of the immanent. As a contemporary observer put it, melodrama ‘places characters
in striking situations, leaving the situations to tell for themselves’…
The objectification of emotion in character and action, then, suggests
the implicit operation of providential forces. In melodrama, character
is destiny, but the laws of the form require this destiny to be manifest
from the beginning. In this context, the individual role – heroine, hero,
villain, good old man, comic servant and so on – becomes the dramatic equivalent
of a lucid predestination. Since the moral posture of the characters is
initially clear, the play itself is occupied essentially with a series
of events which will cumulatively and finally demonstrate the justness
of these characterizations. The ethical purpose of melodrama is to reorder
the material world so that it mirrors inherent truths.

p.
125

[…] a consistent
relationship develops in melodramatic dramaturgy between the disruption
of society and its final restoration to harmony. In traditional comedy
this movement from disorder to order enables certain characters, often
a young man and woman in love, to learn something about themselves and
the world and to accept their place in it. Melodrama, on the contrary,
does not move towards eventual enlightenment. The reconciliations it provides
are of a hostile or uncertain world to the just deserts of already ideal
human beings. The more desperately irretrievable the situation, the more
satisfying its climactic reversal. The miraculous recovery, the obscure
technicality, the sudden shower of gold (as in Jerrold’s The Rent Day)
– all accident only certifies the nature of a world whose charted course
is hidden from our eyes but unswervingly true.